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To explain a guidance update issued in February 2017 by the staff of the Division of Investment Management (Staff) at the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on how robo-advisers may meet their disclosure, suitability and compliance obligations under the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 (Advisers Act).

Examines the update’s guidance on three areas – the substance and presentation of disclosures, the provision of suitable investment advice, and the adoption and implementation of effective compliance programs – and then raises practical considerations for robo-advisers.

The update reflects the Staff’s increasing concern about the potential risks of the robo-adviser platform and provides a listing of key issues that the SEC’s Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations (OCIE) – which recently added “electronic investment advice” as a new focus for its 2017 examinations – may zero in on when examining robo-advisory firms.

Robo-advisers should carefully review the Staff’s update to evaluate whether their firms’ operations address the guidance.

Practical advice from experienced securities regulatory lawyers.

To inform readers of the challenges that fintech companies can have regarding investment company status, using two recent examples.

The article provides an introduction to the subject, discusses two examples of fintech companies that had investment company status challenges, and provides concluding remarks regarding each.

Navigating investment company status can be challenging for fintech companies, and in some cases, as was the case with the two companies discussed in the article, it may be necessary, or at least advisable, to seek to obtain an order from the SEC.

It is important for fintech companies to evaluate their investment company status in early stages and continue to monitor their status thereafter, particularly if they are considering a public offering.

Technical guidance from experienced investment company status lawyers.

In this chapter Suzanne Ross draws on her experience previously as a talent manager and now as a leadership consultant, Executive Coach and Senior Lecturer in Executive Education, and applies her research on leadership derailment to talent management. As organizations continue to invest in leadership development, research suggests up to 50 per cent of leaders derail or fail in their role. The derailment literature is, to-date, disconnected from TM although central to the definition of leadership derailment is that derailed leaders were previously successful and had potential. The chapter explores the concept of derailment, how it is defined, its scale and scope and some of the causes of derailment including a lack of organizational support during leadership transitions. The notion of the ‘accidental manager’ is used to provide an example of where literature on TM and derailment converge as a key derailer characteristic is having an overly functional orientation. This maps to the accidental manager concept and to the challenges that TM practitioners face in developing career pathways for expert/specialists beyond managerial roles. Suzanne argues that talent identification should take more account of derailment characteristics and suggests there may be gender differences in how these are perceived and in the consequences that arise when they are present. The chapter contributes to a greater understanding of how the concept of derailment can be integrated within talent management research and practice.

Scholarship on workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is voluminous. Nevertheless, there is relatively little work that examines DEI from an organization development and change (ODC) or systems perspective. As a result, there is no unified framework ODC practitioners can use for DEI diagnosis and intervention. The purpose of this chapter is to review the ODC literature with respect to DEI and propose a diagnostic Context-Levels-Culture (CLC) framework for understanding and addressing diversity-related challenges in organizations. We also present a case example of how this framework can be used in DEI consulting, including implications for future research and practice.

This issue of Retail Insights focuses on the subject of branding. There are a number of retail reports that offer valuable insights into current trends in branding. Professor Leslie de Chernatony analyses UK consumers’ attitudes towards brand extensions in a survey commissioned by Ventura. The Brand Finance Report for 1999 provides interesting reading on brand values and the overall performance of companies last year. In addition, there are a collection of shorter reports on various new branding issues and abstracts of articles on the topic.

This study proposes an objective assessment model to evaluate the performance of internal and external capabilities of firms. It facilitates firms to invest appropriate resources to cultivate the organizational capability necessary to meet the requirements of the performance indicators.

This study integrates the concepts of resource-based theory, the organizational capability concept, and conduct a performance analysis to the four perspectives of the BSC by implementing the fuzzy set theory and data employment analysis.

The findings show that the appropriate strategies help allocate available resources and capabilities during the different product life cycle, which provides practical guidelines for firms to achieve sustaining competitive advantage.

The selected factors were focused on four resources and capabilities rather than all possible factors.

An objective assessment model was created based on internal and external competitive performance efficiency in this research field. This model facilitates the ability of the top management to make decisions for resource allocation that will enhance firm's performance.

The author argues that contemporary college culture is predicated on hedonism indicated by a use of predominantly social time in which parties, alcohol, casual sex, and lax academics pervade students' experiences. Coincident with this culture, however, is a deleterious pattern among students that has developed dramatically: their compromised mental health. The situation presents an apparent paradox: why are many students suffering when enveloped by fun? This chapter draws a connection between fun and suffering by treating each as conditions that spring from the sociohistorical context that situates institutions of higher education. In so doing, a theory is set forth to explain why despair is rendered applicable and how it is institutionally installed in the minds of modern-day college students.

Most research on the work conditions and family responsibilities associated with work-family conflict and other measures of mental health uses the individual employee as the unit of analysis. We argue that work conditions are both individual psychosocial assessments and objective characteristics of the proximal work environment, necessitating multilevel analyses of both individual- and team-level work conditions on mental health.

This study uses multilevel data on 748 high-tech professionals in 120 teams to investigate relationships between team- and individual-level job conditions, work-family conflict, and four mental health outcomes (job satisfaction, emotional exhaustion, perceived stress, and psychological distress).

We find that work-to-family conflict is socially patterned across teams, as are job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion. Team-level job conditions predict team-level outcomes, while individuals’ perceptions of their job conditions are better predictors of individuals’ work-to-family conflict and mental health. Work-to-family conflict operates as a partial mediator between job demands and mental health outcomes.

Our findings suggest that organizational leaders concerned about presenteeism, sickness absences, and productivity would do well to focus on changing job conditions in ways that reduce job demands and work-to-family conflict in order to promote employees’ mental health.

We show that both work-to-family conflict and job conditions can be fruitfully framed as team characteristics, shared appraisals held in common by team members. This challenges the framing of work-to-family conflict as a “private trouble” and provides support for work-to-family conflict as a structural mismatch grounded in the social and temporal organization of work.

In the previous chapter, we explored in a broad sense, the idea of various types of expectancy related to processes involved in the delivery of treatment, and the desire of the client for treatment approaches and other important preferences. In this chapter, I discuss four more variables that we can consider to align to the theme of inner experiences, of the practitioner, with a lesser focus on the client. The relationship between outcomes and emotional expression of the client and practitioner, and outcomes related to the practitioner’s counter-transference (CT), self-disclosure (TSD), and use of immediacy (Im) are discussed. As with previous chapter, definitions are provided, the research base is explored, and Top Tips for each variable are outlined for the developing and seasoned practitioner.